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It's not exactly the same question. Wouldn't that response include much more than Facebook and Twitter? E.g. Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, Google+, a long tail of social media sites?

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It's a great point. To compare benchmarks, we'd have to consider...6 months in behavioral changes since the Pew survey; the likelihood that long tail users also use the main social properties; what we actually classify as a social network; medium effects on answer bias and more.

I couldn't agree more with your points about the importance of survey design. Our hope with GCS is to provide a real time, affordable, iterative mechanism for conducting this type of research.

The challenges faced when benchmarking against Pew and others, is, I believe, an indication of the value of continually collecting and updating data.

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